


I Was Afraid

by brittlelimbs



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Aliens, Anxiety Attacks, Collars, Light Dom/sub, M/M, OCs - Freeform, Pining, Possessive Behavior, Protective Hux, Violence, Whump, collared!ren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 11:17:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6751789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlelimbs/pseuds/brittlelimbs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The collar around Ren's neck makes sure that he knows he's loved. Knows he's safe.<br/>In the heat of battle, when he's at his most vulnerable, he loses it-- and all hell breaks loose. </p><p>Third party POV, based on my friend's the idea that Ren uses Hux's collar around his neck as a quasi-sadistic security blanket to keep him safe from Snoke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Was Afraid

The medical officer finds it when he slits open Ren’s armor, mediblade scoring from sternum to belly, splitting open charred wool and leather like the carcass of some beast, flayed open.

The smell of burning human flesh is nearly unbearable. There, trenched across Ren’s broad chest in an arc of burning blaster wound from shoulder to hip: failure, the signature left by a saber-swing one half-step too late. His armor might have taken the worst of it, but the chief medical officer hadn’t been able to hold back his wince when they’d brought Ren in from the battle. He was moaning nakedly, helmet lost somewhere in the bedlam outside. Such young man, the officer had thought, watching while the laymen heaved him onto the table, crimson human blood on the white-shellac of their armor. Kylo Ren, the terrible, the snarling, is scant older than thirty cycles, barely more than a pup by any self-respecting species standards. Surprising. But then again, war doesn’t care; this is probably one of the gnarlier injuries he’s seen since Q’Dar, heaped before him in blackened script on the operating table like a great, stinking animal, all dark cloth and matted hair and spasmodic, angry projection that’s making the officer’s head hurt just by being near its source. He clicks his mandibles together in contemplation; he’s never done surgery on a Force sensitive before, and doesn’t particularly relish the idea. The bacta vials lined up along his instrument tray tremble as if in agreement.

He wonders if, when he digs into the flesh of Kylo Ren, the General’s right hand, his pet, they’re going to explode—he’s heard that Sith do that. Wreck things with their minds. He would prefer if they didn’t; they’re scraping the bottom of their reserves as it is.

The door cycles open and a staff sergeant ducks into the dinge-yellow, claustrophobic space of the operating theater. He has a bacta compress bandaged over his right temple which the medical officer had laid himself only minutes before. Or maybe it was hours; the bodies are piling in too blur-quick for him to keep track, and he realizes, then, with embarrassment, that he still has cerulean blood on his hands from his last patient. This outpost had been hit so fast and so hard by the Resistance that he wonders how many Order footsoldiers lay dying right now, at this very second, while Ren occupies the table and the medical attention of their kriffing solitary unit.

He tries to wipe his hands clean on his trousers as discreetly as possible while the sergeant rips off a salute, smart as ever even in his singed uniform, and clears his throat. “Communications report that the General is on his way here from the equator now, sir,” he says. “Arrival time estimated to be twenty minutes.”

 _Alright_ , the officer clicks. _Tell him we’re keeping the patient steady._

 _Patient_ doesn’t seem like the right kind of word to describe this—thing on the table before him, but the rough Basic equivalent will have to do. He dismisses the officer, then returns to Ren,

It’s not a particularly pretty sight. In fact, the officer marvels that Ren wasn’t shredded through by the fractured blaster bolt entirely. Maybe he’d half-blocked, maybe he’d dodged; his saber glints where a trooper put it on the little bank of storage lockers afforded by the makeshift operating room, though the officer hasn’t the faintest as to how you’d fight with it. There are plenty of old Empire holos, sure, but he’s never seen a kriffing _lightsabe_ r in person, for starssake. It’s a dead weapon, a relic, and just another thing about Ren that makes the officer’s slender antennae rankle with malaise.

He tells to the medidroid at his hip to prepare a cleansing wash while he takes his multitool from his belt and selects a short blade. They need fast access; they’re going to have cut him out. He starts at the top of the roughhewn tunic, pushing hard through the thickness of it, through it parts easily around his knife, falls open under his dexterous, curled fingers. Then the odd little top beneath, then the underclothes that were once white, now stained damp and heavy and scorched. He peels away the flimsy, soaked layer, and hisses: multiple burns and gouges, class three by the look of them. Ugly. He bets there’s still shrapnel humming inside that pale flesh, splintered bits of bright-raw energy digging deep and insidious under Ren’s ribs.

The officer must work quickly (as he always must. This is his Job).

Multitool set neatly aside, he goes to Ren’s neck, lifting his great, lolling head to feel around for a closure at the back of his ribbed neckpiece. Humans and their stupid, fragile biology, their achingly tender and vulnerable pieces; slicing his trachea is a risk the officer doesn’t particularly want to run. Ah. There: he works the little catch with his ridged fingertips, and it comes free, allowing the cowl to slip away.

He pauses.

Kylo Ren’s neck, while relatively intact, is encircled with some kind of—necklace. No, he corrects himself, necklace isn’t quite the right word; the officer takes an indulgent second to investigate, mandibles clicking and sucking as he squints in close. It’s a svelte little thing, silver-y gleaming, tucked so tight to Ren’s throat that it’s like a second skin, cupped gently under the swell of his Adam’s apple so perfectly that it seems to have been to custom fit. Probably was. It’s made of no material the officer has ever seen, and something about the grace of its curvature strikes him as odd; this is something special, something secret, made never to be taken off.

A pity he’ll have to do just that.

He tosses the cowl to the ground, then gently pries the tip of the blade beneath the edge of the slim collar, hoping that it’ll come free. It does after a moment, with a faint, sharp _sshk_ , cloven halves instantly slithering down the sides of Ren’s neck before jangling onto the table below.

The bacta vials explode.

Ren’s violent reactions come more quickly than the officer is able to catalogue them. It’s not entirely clear what’s happening at first-- no, there’s far too much strange, hardwired confusion between alien nervous systems for that— but one thing is readily apparent: his patient is a man undone. Hacked-up robes slough from his shoulders as he jerks up on the table, shedding flecks of blood and flesh and cloth all over the place like some hellish, angry stormcloud. Eyes wide and wild, unseeing, one sclera shot through entirely with red to fit the rest of him; his raw, festering wounds squeeze rivulets down his chest as he thrashes, and for a moment, all the officer can do is _witness_ as his patient needles the fragments buried in his chest deeper, deeper.

“ _Nnghh_!” Kylo Ren gurgles, eyes roiling in his scull, a half-crazed animal. The officer can tell that he’s breathing fifty-fifty air and blood, just by the wet sound of it.

How he _hates_ Force sensitives.

But that doesn’t mean he isn’t yoked to his duty, that he hasn’t done worse; steadying himself one hand, he starts running plans and backup plans through old routes in his head, reaching for a syringe with the other. Knock him out. Save blood. He tells the droid to prepare a sedative, then tries to grip Ren’s bicep and force him bodily down again with every ounce of academy training he’s ever received. They taught him how to do this once, brute-force, raw, physical push, but this fight was not a fair one to begin with; the room is rattling so hard it’s like Ren has tipped the little room upside-down and is trying, with much difficulty, to shake it free of its contents.

 _Stop!_ The officer shrieks. A scalpel whizzes past his shoulder. _You’ll kill yourself!_

Oh, honestly, he hopes he does. This is the twelfth hour of his shift and he’s running on something less than fumes and this horrible, hulking man won’t stop trying, desperately, to scream around the fluid bleeding into his lungs—

The officer hits the wall so, so hard. Hard enough that, for a few seconds, he can’t breathe. When there is room for something more than the ringing in his head, he thinks, abstractly, that he’s lucky the room isn’t bigger; might’ve actually broken something. Also: _fuck_ Kylo Ren. While First Order medical training does, in its more furtive clauses, encompass the possibility of treating a patient who is actively trying to kill you (he still has scars from a resistance fighter they’d caught alive a few months back), it does not prepare you for a patient who is able to kill you _with their mind._

His membranes are throbbing soundly, the room around him is spark-popping out vision with the telltale omens of a wicked concussion, and for a moment, he considers just… staying there. Playing dead. Waiting around until Kylo Ren bleeds himself dry, until B shift comes and clean up this mess. Stars know he deserves it.

Then in a detached sort of way, he watches General Hux enter the operation room just in time to dodge a flying hydroventilator. What was once a very expensive piece of equipment shatters in spectacular fashion on the low beam behind his head, becoming nothing more than colorful shards. The aide who’s piled down the stairs behind Hux immediately barks something, tugging him back by the arm as she assesses the room with dark eyes, attempting to maneuver him back to the relative safety of the stairway.

The General is having none of this; he twists away from her with a decidedly snippy jerk.

“I’m _quite alright.”_

The officer thinks that his voice comes off more prim than it does in the protocol broadcasts, and, frankly, that this is bantha shit. The indomitable Hux looks gaunt for his age, skin drawn dry, tired-looking and taught. There are still flurries from aboveground resting tenuously in his sleek hair, glinting sickly in the dim lighting. His boss’s boss is a hollow man, the officer realizes, sagging in this perfectly coifed shell, and anyone could pick up on it, there in the set of those shoulders, that deep sense of war-weariness. The officer sees it, at least. He knows it himself.

Back in the eye of the storm, Ren keens, then vomits a long string of blood and bile of the edge of the operating table, dangerously close to the officer’s boot.

All at once everything about Hux is full, frantic, crack-slip of the tired facade into something much more anxious and frenzied. Hux doesn’t seem to see the officer, or if he did, he doesn’t care; he’s already striding to Ren’s side amidst the debris and pulling off his gloves. Without a moment’s hesitation he slips a bare hand around the nape of Ren’s neck, and—it takes a moment for the officer to quite understand, to rattle the word loose from the deep storage of his memory, but he’s _kissing_ Ren. There is no embarrassment nor shrewdness in this.

The frenetic movement of everything, each jangling, stainless steel piece of it, ceases at once. The officer narrowly avoids having a mediscan unit crush his hand as it clatters to the floor.

When Hux pulls away he has Ren’s blood on his lips, a bright petals blooming right there on the fullness of his mouth, and Ren watches him with crossing eyes he wipes it off on the back of his hand, wearing an expression that only borders on disgust. No, more than anything, the General looks relieved, working his soiled hand into that knotted hair, tracing along the bare expanse of pale neck with the other. His knight mewls, leans pitifully into the touch.

“I couldn’t—“ Ren chokes out, garbled, drowning in himself. “Collar—“ The word is shocking on his lips. Collared. Kylo Ren is _collared_ , the officer marvels, and has the daring, or the lack of inhibition, to admit it out loud. Ren leaves the cradle of his general’s arms, hissing in agony as he twists to try and reach the gleaming fragment splayed on the ground by Hux’s horrified feet.

“No!” Hux spits, wrestling Ren back without much difficulty, gripping around his jaw, cupping under that pouty, gore-wet mouth. Then, more quietly: “Hush. Stop. There is no place you could go that I wouldn’t follow. No corner of that galaxy he could hide you away where I wouldn’t find you.”

The expression on Ren’s face looks sickeningly similar to bliss. _“Yours_ ,” he wheezes, or something that sounds like it. “ _Yours_.”

Oh, by the maker. The officer would roll his eyes if he could.

Hux kisses him quiet, then, mumbles incoherently to Ren, something about _fuck you for making me worry so much_ , something about _they’d told me you’d died._ It’s a stupidly, achingly tender thing, the way they’re postured around each other, hard to look at, almost. Hard to understand.

 _He might_ , the officer suddenly blurts, though he couldn’t say why. He thinks of the splintered pieces of plasma, marching ever deeper into Ren’s chest cavity with every breath.

Hux whirls around, and the officer doesn’t miss how he tries to tuck Ren’s trashed body behind him at this new threat, just the slightest bit.

_If he doesn’t get into surgery soon, he will, I promise you._

“Ah,” Hux breathes, looking slightly embarrassed at himself, before squaring his shoulders, looking straight down his nose. There he is, the old Hux. “Officer,” he says, commanding, as evenly as if he had just swept in from the bridge of the _Finalizer_ , as if his kiss wasn’t still lingering warm against Kylo Ren’s open mouth.

“Are you able-bodied?”

The officer’s head throbs excruciatingly. He thinks he might have cracked a rib. _Yessir._

“Then you will assist me in taking your patient to my shuttle.”

The officer does not miss the tremor in his voice.

_Right away, sir._

To his surprise, Hux slings one of Ren’s lanky arms over his shoulders and heaves him up, nodding his head at the officer to aid him under the other. Ren, though some sheer force of will, perhaps, is able to keep his chin from dropping to his chest, and the officer stoops to help him stand. He smells rank. He’s unbelievably heavy.

“I—Love you,” Ren slurs out once they get him fully standing. “You. I love you.” Tipsy with blood-loss and fear and a pain tolerance that’s been worn to nothing, words couched unsteadily in his red-raw mouth. That’s just the truth of it, the officer decides, watching the two of them stare at each other with stars in their eyes: they are nothing more than a badly written holodrama, guts and possessiveness and all; every time they wax poetic to each other, he’s half-certain he’s going to vomit. His stipend is much, much too miserly for this type of shit.

Finally, they manage to get him to the doorway. As they mutually shuffle around to get a better grip, compensating for Ren’s failing legs, General Hux glances to across Ren’s collarbones and whispers “thank you,” in the tiniest possible voice.

Oh.

There’s an awkward pause.

Finally, somewhere, he finds an answer: _It is my duty, sir._

 

When the three of them finally emerge into the whipping cold, strip lighting of Hux’s shuttle blazing into the night, the officer’s stomach is roiling and nauseous. But, then again, that might just be the concussion.

**Author's Note:**

> comments always loved!  
> floatin-on-bespin.tumblr.com


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